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Comment by stanmancan | Hacker News Reader

I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a contract for just over $100k/year.

I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue.

I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m.

All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my time. It has freed up the rest of my time to keep building similar projects that can both boost and diversify my MRR.

I’m very grateful that I’m able to work on projects I enjoy now, but more importantly it’s given me time to spend with my family and be around for my kid.

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Wow, those number sound so high for a third world country that I can't help thinking that if I were in your situation I would give half of that salary (5k monthly) to my brother and father so they wouldn't have to worry about money again. Congratulations for being in that situation!

Parent didn't get where he is today by giving away half (!) of his salary.

He didn't get there by not giving half of his salary.

Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work.

I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar things.

Your country has a welfare net. For the third world countries usually children are the welfare net. It's not that hard to understand.

There is factually/intellectually understanding it, and then there is being able to see things through that point of view, which opens up in depth discussions from it.

As parent said, he may have the first type, but not the second, so it's hard for him to answer on it without making it sound like a culture clash.

My non-European partner gives money to their parents despite being fairly middle-class and fiscally stable. You're right, it's cultural - theirs expects grown children to contribute to the parents after spending their childhood paying for them. It's an investment into the family unit as a whole, as the family will support you beyond what the state welfare could provide. Had a car accident and need some money? The family can help. Want help with a deposit for a place? The family will contribute.

In my waspy American family, nobody asks for help or even would let it be known they are in need. It would be an embarrassment. We are individual capitalist and you must not be weak!

That said, there are a few deadbeats who try to take advantage by always being in need. But only to finance their life of leisure, not real need.

I can't comprehend how you could judge someone negatively for wanting to provide for their family. So yes there does seem to be a huge cultural gap here and in this case I don't think Scandanavia does it better. Even if I lived in a country with a good safety net I would want to share my success with my family.

I know several Scandinavians personally who help their friends & family monetarily. It's also real common in Estonia, which is about a hundred miles from Scandinavia. Thus I don't think helping family is something that is missing in the region. More likely it's just a blind spot for spottybanana.

Most of Canada (population wise) is about a hundred miles from the USA. They even speak the same language! Yet ... assuming a similar set of moral archetypes and social behaviors on that basis would be a mistake.

Geography is interesting, but not deterministic.

Do you think Seattle is more similar to Vancouver or to some city in Alabama?

It's not an absolute rule for sure, especially over a short period, just look at Korea. However I've found that distance generally plays a very large role in culture, especially if given enough time. Of course it doesn't determine everything. You can find completely different cultures in different blocks in New York city. People don't always see eye-to-eye with their neighbor just some meters away.

In the case of Estonia & Scandinavia the history is rather long and entangled. There are the Vikings, who liked nearby islands - including islands of Estonia that aren't Scandinavia. There have been periods where Estonia was conquered and part of both the Swedish kingdom and the Danish kingdom. Even the Danish flag is attributed to a battle in Estonia. [1]

Would I say that Estonian culture is a copy of Swedish or Danish culture? Definitely not, there are significant differences. There are also big differences between rural and urban areas. There's probably more similarities between Estonian farmers and Swedish farmers than Estonian farmers & Estonian software developers.

At the end of the day, you can't deterministically say anything at all about a group of people, even if it's a small group. Saying something general about people in an area as large as Scandinavia is always going to be probabilistic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lyndanisse

> just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here

This is why socialism works in scandinavian countries (it's a need, not a luxury), but fails in the south of europe

siblings are one thing, but your parents most likely worked very hard and spent a lot of money on you when you were young. They probably sacrificed some of their desires just so you could get an education, live comfortably, etc.

If you can repay them somehow and make their lives easier, why not do so?

Brit here. We have a welfare state (just about...), though it's getting pretty grim lately.

I've given a decent amount to family over the years. For the most part it's about a recognition of what people have done for me. My mother sacrificed significantly so that I could be the person I am today.

Not every country rewards work equivalently. In Sweden I see people working in supermarkets and petrol stations that still have decent lives. Norway is wealthier still.

That's not the case in Britain for the most part - we have much higher income inequality. Someone can work a full time job and still struggle, because the low end jobs pay biscuits.

(This is probably a significant contributor to the sticker shock I have when shopping in Scandinavia - the staff actually get paid...)

Real income in the UK has plummeted in the last two decades. The government's employment figures are just smoke and mirrors masking a gig economy full of low pay and sofa-surfing. The government has now started harassing low-income in-work housing benefit claimants to make sure they are doing enough to increase their hours. This is new territory as the housing element in Universal Credit payments was previously exempt from sanctions.

Coming from a different country it is really difficult to understand why someone would keep their money for themselves instead of helping their families. Over here families thrive and fail together.

American here, my retired mom gets only "social security", which is about $700/mo. I have to give her some of my income or she would sink. (I don't give her cash directly, but I take care of repairs on her house, new appliances, her car maintenance, etc)

I wish her pension would cover her real living expenses.

Every culture in the world considers helping family to be natural and positive. Many consider it a responsibility, and that’s a beautiful thing.

> it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income.

This is an interesting mindset. I don't want to judge you either, but I never understood the value of keeping my money and collecting wealth. If I were struggling, I wouldn't go out of my way to help my family. But if I had extra income, I would help my family if they were in need.

He is from a country with a strong socialist welfare system, so when one is in need, the government is there to assist them and they don't need to feel like they are a burden on their family and friends.

Agreed, but this reminds me of the old joke about a bruised scout who comes limping to his friends. "What happened?", they ask. "I helped an old lady cross the street", says the scout. "But why are you so hurt?" "She didn't want to cross the street".

Obviously, if my family doesn't need help, I wouldn't try to give them money. But if they were in need, I wouldn't say that it's not my responsibility to help either. I think this is a simple judgement call. The efficiency of the Scandinavian welfare system is besides the point.

It is common in asian cultures (I'm from India), where kids take care of parents and even extended families like uncles etc as they grow old. Though this pattern is shrinking in cities, most of them do keep aside money for their parents during their old age. In old times, whatever people earn is not for them to keep. The money from all the bread winners will be pooled by elders and will be shared by everyone for running of the joint family. This too is becoming uncommon but atleast people keep aside money (or some equivalent) so that it can be used for expenses of aged parents ...

Really you guys don't do that? umm we do appreciate family values here. my brother who makes a lots of money just bought new car for my other brother who doesn't work yet i guess it's good thing to do this you win the family.

Yup, there are many such hard to understand gaps from both sides. E.g. one such thing would be, in the "west" (I guess it's the same for Scandinavia) it is so common that parents are being put in old people's homes to spend their last moments of life among strange people, instead of their children taking care of them at home.

Where in the post it says he is from 3rd world?

I think "for a third world country" here means "from (my) third world country perspective".

Yes, that's what I meant, sorry.

The "site with ads" is the one that really interests me. Can you give some details on that? What kind of site it is, how you grew traffic, what you use for ads? (Just AdWords?)

I made an API for myself in 2011 that I could consume at work. I made a site that lets people query it from a web app and docs on the API. Didn’t think anyone would actually use it though. Tossed an ad on it and forgot about it.

The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only use Google AdWords and it runs on a $40/m VPS.

We introduced paid plans a year ago and had a few sign ups. I think the paid accounts are about $440MRR but I split it with a friend who did all the work around paid accounts. (I didn’t think it would be worthwhile, he did, so he did the work around paid subscriptions)

What's the API do if you don't mind sharing?

In his submissions on HN there's a link to macvendors.com

Pretty cool simple idea.

I visited the site, and turned off my adblocker, but am not seeing any ads. Are the ads hidden somewhere? What does one have to do to see ads these days? Edit - Nevermind, I thought I had my ad blocker off, but apparently incognito mode didn't turn it off like I expected it would.

Adwords, as in you pay to advertise the site on Google?

I found your project since you previously posted it on HN and linked to it in an answer below (hope you don't mind, I'll remove it if you want).

Sorry, Adsense

This is super interesting to me. I have a couple questions! Although, by the way, found a typo on your /api page-- "The power behind MAC Vendors API is it's simplicity. Get started instantly, no registration required." That should be `its`, not `it's`.

Anyway, this whole thing confuses the hell out of me. You're receiving 3.6 billion requests per year and you've been serving it all for free with a single adsense ad and only making a couple grand a month off of it? I feel like I don't really understand. Shouldn't the hosting costs for multiple billions of requests be huge? Shouldn't you be charging for that? I'm speaking as someone who's never built anything like this, so I don't really know.

I am serving around 3 billion requests a month (so around 10x more than OP) from one dedicated server that cost less than 100 euro a month.

300 million a month only works out to around 115 a second. The API has been optimized a lot. We could probably handle 2x the traffic we are currently getting before needing to upgrade the server.

We do have paid accounts now but it doesn’t amount to a ton, around $440MRR.

I hesitated adding paid accounts for a long time because it cost so little to run but the ad revenue was alright.

Lots of niche markets out there, but my at revenue did take a long, slow path over 8 years to get to this point.

It really doesn't need to be expensive to serve hundreds-to-thousands of requests per second. Despite what some people will tell you, that's not actually very significant load.

Can you broadly talk about how you came up with the idea, how you contacted the company?

An acquaintance worked for the company and asked for help replacing an existing paper process with an excel document. I helped, but mentioned a web app would work much better. The company trialed the excel version but came back with some concerns. I talked it over with the friend and decided to spend my free time building it out. Once I had a beta ready they trailed it in their location and they loved it. We got it into 2 more locations (all free at this point) and everyone loved it. That raised interest and other stores in the district started asking for it. We launched it across the whole district and finally started to charge. After a year the company decided to launch it nationally. It was a risky move to do the work up front since it could have fizzled out, but it worked out in the end.

Beautiful! one again, "find Excel use case and replace with web app" seems to have worked :)

Thank you for responding.

Absolutely, I think there’s plenty of money to be made finding problems companies don’t know they have. The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for.

Asking here, unable to reply to the comment below.

The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for.

As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? I tried the cold email route (even made a friend this way, we still keep in touch after two years, though we haven't met and probably never will), but I didn't succeed. I probably could have, but it made me so uncomfortable writing to total strangers :(

> As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this?

You need to develop contacts at companies! There are lots of different ways to build your network, but the bottom line is that to be successful with this line of work, which is essentially consulting (at least in the beginning stages), you need to meet people and earn their trust. If you are introverted this will likely feel awkward and uncomfortable (which is why it’s called getting out of your comfort zone).

It takes a fair bit of effort to get someone to the point where they are willing to walk you through their business processes. Showing genuine interest in their operations and asking lots of good questions is key.

Yup this pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Learning to listen is very important, and really understanding what people are saying. Lots of times they aren’t really complaining, they’re just talking about something and if you’re listening closely you can identify potential opportunities in their systems and processes. Often people don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t come at you directly with a problem.

At an old job it was someone’s job to run a “install history report”, it was all the installs that were done the previous week (thousands) and read through it copying and pasting installs from specific cities into an excel sheet. It took about 12 hours a week. He explained this process whole asking a completely different question. I ended up writing a little script that completed this same task in a few seconds. He didn’t even know that was possible, so he didn’t know to ask.

Was it hard to negotiate/agree with them on the price?

Not particularly, I started a bit higher than I really wanted so they could negotiate down a bit, but it’s a reasonable price for what they get. I think the trick is pricing based on value provided by the solution; what’s it worth to them?

Cool. Well done!

What did your acquaintance get for their part?

I had a kindof similar situation long ago, where a friend worked for a high-frequency trading company and I had been developing a low-overhead high-precision resource and system monitoring framework. I would supply him development builds of the agents and a web login to monitor and tune their trading systems while I got some free production testing in return, it seemed fair at the time.

As things matured and I started exploring paths for monetization, when I approached that trading company about a possible contract my "friend" demanded half ownership stake in the business in return for their becoming the first paying customer.

Nope.

Acquaintance got the recognition at work for the tool implementation. They also got a vastly superior solution to a problem they had at work.

I had another opportunity to develop a similar tool for another company, but the person who pitched it wanted 50% despite having nothing to offer other than the idea, so I politely declined.

... so you got nothing at the end?

Please write a blog post for us to learn from you.

Don't take this the wrong way.

What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you?

Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.

What type of hosting/maintenance are you doing for clients and how did you find these clients? Interesting you were able to find opportunities for hosting services when there are so many easy PaaS options out there now.

Most companies don't know what hosting options they have. They'll take the first recommendation from their "tech person" or whoever developed their site.

The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved.

I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using.

On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)

What kind of site do you run that generates $1.5k/month in ad revenue? High traffic niche blog?

One of many MAC address lookup services, https://macvendors.com

Awesome numbers! Did you do CS at college?

Nope all self taught. Nothing I’ve done is very complex.

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